| Title | : | Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0140421998 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780140421996 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 145 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1855 |
Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition Reviews
-
" I am the poet of the body
And I am the poet of the soul. "
I do not know how to review poetry or what to look for when I am reading it. All I can say is whether I liked it or not. I really, really liked this. Although it was written in 1855, the free verse felt fresh and actual. It was an ode to nature, love, sex and the self. I was recommended the 1855 version because it has some interesting punctuation and I thought it complemented the text well.
" I celebrate myself
And what i assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you"
and the famous " I am large.... I contain multitudes" -
I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,
The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into new tongue.
I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,
And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,
And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.
This is the first edition of Leaves of Grass published in 1855, which consists of 12 poems. In his poems Whitman exalts nature and humans, regardless of sex, race, class and profession. For him a prostitute is worth as much as a nobleman. The body is as worthy as the soul. The woman is honored as the man…
I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,
To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then?
I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea. -
It is becoming increasingly trendy to chalk up success to practice and hard work. We have the famous 10,000 hours from Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, and a similar theme from Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein, just to name two examples. But it seems to me that some people were just born to do what they did, that no amount of practice could ever have produced something so fresh, original, new, and revolutionary.
Take Montaigne. He invented a new genre (the essay), pioneered a free and easy prose style, and popularized a down-to-earth skeptical attitude. There was no precedent to his proclamation that he would write about only himself. To be sure, he worked very hard on his essays—going over them again and again, crossing out a line here, adding one there. But it wasn’t the practicing that made him special, it was that his essays were the expression of an entirely original type of person, who effortlessly broke every rule.
Walt Whitman is a similar case. Though free verse had precedents in the Biblical psalms, no poet had emancipated himself so completely from prosody, rhythm, and rhyme. Though deism was trendy with the Transcendentalists, Emerson’s and Thoreau’s perspectives were a far cry from Whitman’s mysticism. Not to mention that his celebration of the bodily pleasures and sexuality scandalized nearly everybody. Could 10,000 hours of anything have produced that? How do you practice to be original?
This is all besides the point, I suppose. This poem is gorgeous. It’s so modern in its sensibilities, I almost want to say that it could have been written in the 50s or 60s; but Whitman’s reverence for nature, love, and life was so pure and raw, that no disillusioned Cold War drug fueled Beats or Hippies could have come close. There is nothing trendy in his poetry—he was a member of no movement. He was not writing in verse to 'rebel’ against anything, but to celebrate everything he saw worth celebrating.
At his worst, Whitman is repetitive: continually rehashing ideas and imagery, and producing some uninspiring lists. But at his best, Whitman is revelatory. When the force of his original perspective is married to the force of his original style, the product is as extraordinary as it is inimitable. The words and ideas are woven around each other like a vine growing around a tree, producing a poem that lives and breathes—so freshly harvested from his mind, that even now it seems to still have dirt and roots clinging to it.
I’m happy to see that America has produced a poet capable of upholding the democratic principle without descending into ‘just one of us plain folksiness’. And I’m glad to see that America has produced an individualist that is not peevish and immature. I’m saying “America produced," but I’m not really sure what mysterious force results in people like Whitman and Montaigne. But it sure as hell ain’t 10,000 hours. -
To read American poetry
is to breathe America.
With Whitman I inhale
the kosmos. I expand.
With Dickinson I exhale,
become nobody. I contract.
Visionaries both. They are
the Yang and Yin of
American poetry. -
Walt Whitman writes an ode to America, life, Nature, to democratic individualism with impressive vigour, sincerity and health.
We follow him throughout a busy life where Nature - and the History of men - and wars, especially the Civil War and the technical inventions of the industrial age - appear to be equal.
I think I understand better now, after reading Leaves of Grass, the American spirit, in its specific and non-European aspects.
There is a freshness, energy, vitality, optimism, and unconditional love for life that amaze and delight simultaneously. -
self-love ✨ diversity 🌈 equality ✊ ; oh, how I love Whitman!! his preface to the first edition was particularly enlightening, but let me just say Song of Myself has got to be one of the best poems I’ve ever come across. I can’t give this book 5 stars because there were times when I found Whitman to be a bit tiring and ~over the top~, but consider this a 4,5.
allow me to bless you with some of my favourite lines:
The female contains all qualities and tempers them... she is in her place... she moves with perfect balance,
She is all things duly veiled...she is both passive and active... (I Sing the Body Electric)
Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from;
The scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer,
This head is more than churches or bibles or creeds. (Song of Myself)
Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generations of slaves,
Voices of prostitutes and deformed persons,
Voices of the diseased and despairing, and of thieves and dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
And of the threads that connect the stars – and of wombs, and of the fatherstuff,
And of the rights of them the others are down upon,
Of the trivial and flat and foolish and despised,
Of fog in the air and beetles rolling balls of dung. (Song of Myself) -
My first foray into Whitman territory, and I decided to go with the 1855 text of Leaves of Grass. My purist tendencies made me pick up this edition, despite knowing that Whitman preferred his “deathbed” edition, one that had seen him tinker with the main text for approximately 40 years. I have never watched Dead Poets Society, so I went in blind. I did know, however, that the famous “O Captain! My Captain” is not in this edition.
What an enlightening experience. I had heard shouts of critics (mostly the loud, erudite, and yet bleating voice of Bloom) who had placed this right beside Melville, Twain, and Emerson as the peak of American literature. I haven’t read much of Twain and Emerson, but I have read Melville. When Whitman is hitting, it’s hitting as good as anything I have read in Melville. There were entire pages of poetry that were nothing but flow. I would be wrapped with the warm hug of his words, not knowing where I was or what was happening, only to come out with goosebumps and a shiver down the nape of my neck. The origin of the American Religion, as Bloom mentions. I have yet to truly grasp the influence that this work has had on poets and writers after it. To think that Whitman and Melville were doing their thing at the same time and in the same location is wild to me.
Some special highlights in this collection:
• Whitman’s Preface. Before even getting into the main body of the work, you are slammed with his thoughts on America and living within what the country and its people represent for him. Interesting to see the strong theme of a unified collection of states, as the name of the country suggests, not just one mass nation. He finds similarity, sympathy, and unification in the sum of the whole of the parts, rather than a uniform glob.
• Song of Myself. Not surprising at all, the beating heart of the collection. Section 33 had me chanting and shedding tears. Also home to a classic: Do I contradict myself? Very well then…. I contradict myself. I am large…. I contain multitudes.
• To Think of Time. A theme that is sure to make me want to come back to a work again and again: the passage of time, ageing, senescence.
• There Was a Child Went Forth. Honestly, not sure how he is able to achieve this effect of a life contained in what is probably a span of 2-3 weeks. Perhaps there isn’t a time period set. Perhaps we are just looking back at a life already passed.
• Great Are the Myths. A perfect sign off.
I don’t usually rate poetry, but man. Away with that. A resounding 5 stars. I am headed to the bookstore to pick up the complete collection of Whitman right after this. -
Atmospheric, ephemeral. Transcendental. It’s like going on a long walk during a misty rain – everything is being presented as new and fresh, but a little bit blurry and sometimes it is hard to see where you are or the way ahead.
There’s not much that Whitman fails to elucidate in this epic prose-poem. I read it in stages, slowly, while reading another novel. I think it was best digested this way. Subject wise it is very dense, but because of the poetic style, Whitman has had to choose his words with extreme care – making for a very precise, crystal cut piece of writing, that while seemingly sparse is actually very meaty.
Meaning and insightful messaging literally lift off the pages – in the most pertinent and evocative way. While every American may be encouraged to have a copy of Leaves of Grass on their bookshelf, I think it would be amiss to not recommend that everyone can benefit from reading Whitman’s masterpiece at least once in their life. -
A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child?.... I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?
I'm no expert on Walt Whitman, and given that this poem ('Song of Myself') has been celebrated by everyone from Neruda to Borges to Pessoa to Robin Williams in Dead Poet's Society ('I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world'), I doubt I'm educating anyone by bringing it again to their attention. That said, this was just what I needed this morning as I warmed into my first day alone in the country after too many weeks of a lack of privacy so intense that I have read and written almost nothing. Nervous, wondering if I might piss away the week allotted to me if I couldn't become inspired, I flicked idly through these pages over coffee, remembering, as I often have in the maybe ten years since I first read them, how they once impressed me, and soon found myself enthralled, a tear in my eye, as I read of the child and his unanswerable question. Now, by any popular notion of the word I am not religious, and I have a handful of staunchly anti-religious friends who'll attest to it, though I'll own that these friends strike me as both too literal-minded and too combative (they 'protesteth too much'), and that these days I either ignore or attempt to dissuade them every time they head off on a rant, so narrow and senseless and insensitive do such rants seem to me. The point is: God? 'The Lord'? Hell, to be honest I could give a shit, at least as regards any organised religion's conception of the subject. But something in that line about the handkerchief ('that we may see and remark, and say Whose?') moves me, the same way Bob Dylan (the born again Dylan!) moves me when he sings 'In the fury of the moment / I can see the master's hand / In every leaf that trembles / In every grain of sand.'And I call to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.
I hear and behold God in every object, yet I understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.
Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass;
I find letters from God dropped in the street, and every one is signed by God's name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that others will punctually come forever and ever.
Forever and ever. The constant mystery we know is beyond our powers to explain; even the smallest child who looks at the stars knows that. The constant, ever-renewing mystery which we can tap into now and then, loafing and 'observing a spear of summer grass', but which ultimately we must, again and again, leave behind, knowing it will never go away, but equally that we cannot gaze at it for long.I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you....
These are the thoughts of all men in all ages in all lands, they are not original with me,
If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing or next to nothing,
If they do not enclose everything they are next to nothing,
If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,
If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing....
It is you talking just as much as myself.... I act as the tongue of you,
It was tied in your mouth.... in mine it begins to be loosened.
Big words, huh? As bold as can be. As earnest and without irony (Pessoa did it with irony) yet hardly at all portentous or laughable. Strange, that Whitman should say here 'Logic and sermons never convince', when it seems that this whole epic rant (all 60 pages) is the sermon to end all sermons. But he admits to contradicting himself, explaining 'I am large.... I contain multitudes.' And at one point he falters in his ecstasy:Somehow I have been stunned. Stand back!
Give me a little time beyond my cuffed head and slumbers and dreams and gaping,
I discover myself on a verge of the usual mistake.
That I could forget the mockers and insults!
That I could forget the trickling tears and the blows of the bludgeons and the hammers!
That I could look with a separate look on my own crucifixion and bloody crowning!
For all its joy and exulting in the simple fact of life, 'Song of Myself' is ever aware of suffering: 'the suicide on the bloody floor of the bedroom', the runaway slave ('He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and passed north'), 'the mother condemned for a witch and burnt with dry wood, and her children gazing on'.I do not ask the wounded person how he feels.... I myself become the wounded person'....
I play not a march for victors only.... I play great marches for conquered and slain persons....
This is the meal pleasantly set.... this is the meat and drink for natural hunger,
It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous.... I make appointments with all....
I am the poet of commonsense and of the demonstrable and of immortality;
And am not the poet of goodness only.... I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also....
I don't claim that Whitman's work is perfect, and in fact I skipped or skimmed several passages this morning (I've never been one for lists, and Whitman, in his passion to encompass multitudes – of people and places – is occasionally enamoured of them), but I do think 'Song of Myself' is some kind of a masterpiece. The introduction to this edition (Penguin's 1986 reprinting of 'The First (1855) Edition') compares it to the Bhagavad-Gita, the Upanishads, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Rimbaud's Illuminations, The Chants of Maldoror, Thus Spake Zarathustra and the works of the Beats, and suggests that 'Song of Myself' 'should be judged... as one of the great inspired (and sometimes insane) prophetic works that have appeared at intervals in the Western world'. I agree (though not necessarily with the 'insane' part). With its insistence on a universal spirit beyond the senses or the intellect, and its bold adoption of the voice of that spirit, it resembles nothing so much as one of those letters dropped in the street, signed with the name of God. I said it is without irony, but a gentle self-mockery runs through it, enough to convince us of the humility of the man as he wrestles his personality into submission to hear snatches of the inner voice. 'Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fogs with linguists and contenders,' he says early on (sounding again like Dylan: 'You've been with professors and they've all liked your looks'), and just before the famous yawp he admits: 'The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me.... he complains of my gab and my loitering.' But in the end, though he can't refrain from fictionalising his own portrait in a dandy's effort to give his outpourings the credibility of the proletariat ('Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs'), the impression he leaves is one of deepest attachment to, regard for and identification with the reader.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop some where waiting for you.
Leaves of Grass was self-published by Whitman, a printer's assistant, in Brooklyn in 1855.
-
Whitman, where have you been all my life? But seriously, as someone whose acquaintance with the great "bard of Democracy" had hitherto been strictly secondhand, I was blown away by Leaves of Grass (1855), with how fresh and modern it felt—from its formal elements (language, rhythms, structure...) to the radical egalitarianism of Whitman's vision.
And in a way, I guess I'm even glad for Harold Bloom's painfully overwritten and largely unhelpful introductory essay (2005), which, if anything, only served to underscore—by way of contrast—the directness and vitality of its subject. -
First the pros:
Whitman's free verse is years ahead of its time. I kept having to remind myself that he published this work in 1855. Wordsworth had only been dead for five years, Tennyson and Browning were at the height of their powers and Longfellow was still churning them out. Whitman was an important moderniser.
His verse has tremendous energy. It crackles off the page and I was often swept giddily along by the blizzard of words. Plus, there are some truly striking images to be found. At its best, his poetry is deeply evocative yet also disorientating, allowing the reader to see the "mundane" through new eyes.
This is linked to Whitman's celebration of ordinary men and women, which I also welcomed. While Tennyson was writing about Greek myths and Browning was constructing the interior monologues of Renaissance aristocrats, Whitman's focus was the beauty and profundity of the everyday. In this respect he was the heir to Wordsworth.
Finally, his positivity is forcefully expressed and can be uplifting or even inspiring. Sometimes.
This caveat brings us to the cons:
There are, frankly, way too many words. Image tumbles after imagine in an incontinent stream. I'm sure this was intentional; Whitman wants to overwhelm the reader and the sheer variety of people, objects, occupations, landscapes, etc can sometimes produce a sense of wonder. But it can also bore the reader as Whitman hammers his point into the ground for page after page. Like Dylan Thomas, he seems to have had a facile knack for poetic turns of phrase - they just flowed out of him. But the danger is that the significance of his words diminishes as their volume spirals towards infinity.
Finally, there is something a bit cheap about Whitman's unfailingly positive mysticism. All is good, he blithely assures us, even suffering, pain, ruin and death. But there's absolutely no sense that he's had to struggle to achieve this benign equanimity. He was what William James described as a "healthy-minded", "once-born" writer; someone who was constitutionally incapable of being distressed by the darker side of life. As a result, his mysticism can seem less like an insight and more like a sort of cheerful stupidity. He is not so much a Buddha as a village idiot with an exceptional vocabulary. -
Literary rapture. I don't know how else I could describe my first experience reading Leaves of Grass. It was pure literary rapture.
I highly recommend Leaves of Grass to everyone - especially those who still believe, or want to believe, in the basic goodness of the American Experiment.
Pick up the slim first edition (Whitman revised and expanded Leaves of Grass throughout his life. The final product, which is what is most often seen on bookshelves, is a bloated, redundant beast.
Read the whole thing, introduction included, preferably in one sitting. It will change you. -
I can't believe it, but I'm actually DNF-ing Walt Whitman.
I'm not a literary coward, alright? I read old books and long books and poetry books (and old long books of poetry) all the time. I've read
Moby-Dick and
Middlemarch and
Anna Karenina and
The Brothers Karamazov and
The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost and half of
Shakespeare's corpus, and I enjoyed 'em too! Yet here I find myself, done in by a not-even-that-long collection of not-even-that-old poems. What the hell.
Well, for one thing, there's more than one Leaves of Grass. Whitman published the first edition, this edition, in 1855, at the tenderish age of 37. But he kept revising and adding and removing for the rest of his life, putting out new versions periodically as he went along, which culminated finally in the 1892 "deathbed" edition just before he, well, died. You follow? And so these days if you come across a copy of Leaves in the wild, it's usually either the young virile baby-faced 1855 version...
... or the stately old Granddad of American Poetry 1892 one:
I can't say much about the deathbed edition because I haven't read it. I suspect the poet had mellowed out a bit by then, as septuagenarians are wont to do. But in 1855 Walt was a literary newcomer, a nobody with a chip on his shoulder, and you should always beware young men who have something to prove. He'd read an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson about how the fledgling USA needed a poet to embody and represent it, and he, Walt, took it upon himself to become that poet—in a more mystical sense to become America itself. Which is all a little silly, yes, but remember that these were the days when a young white guy could up and decide to be the eternal voice of a nation or whatever, and if his stuff was good people would kinda just go with it.
Nowadays it's a harder sell. The 1855 Leaves starts out with this interminable, minimum-punctuation prose screed about the role of the Poet and the nature of True Poetry and the perfection of America as a work of Art and a lot of other self-mythologizing tedium like that, and if there's one thing worse than young men with something to prove it's books that begin with authorial screeds. The feel is very Kerouac, which in a historical sense is cool because who knew anyone was writing like Kerouac in the 1850s, but also sucks because like a lot of adults I don't particularly want to read Kerouac even when it's Kerouac.
Anyway, I guess maybe the preface just killed the whole experience for me. The poetry itself is a lot better, of course, imitated ad nauseum by subsequent poets but clearly something original, something new for its time, and I liked a lot of it well enough. I had an impression of Whitman's poetry before I started, and that impression was pretty much confirmed; not exceeded, admittedly, but not whatever the opposite of exceeding is either. I admire Whitman as an author and a personality, his audacity and his lust for life and his willingness to live and write more or less openly as a man who loved men (did you know he
slept with Oscar Wilde?) well before it was deemed acceptable to do so.
But God this book is a lot of lists, a lot of rhapsodizing about how all things are transcendent and beautiful, even ugly things are beautiful, you and me and the bugs and the trees and the cobbler and the blacksmith and the state of New Hampshire and the short-billed marsh wren are all beautiful, all American, all glorify the Creator with our very existence, and after thirty pages or so I felt like I got the point and put the book down and admitted to myself I'd rather do pretty much anything than read the rest.
Someday I think I'll try the deathbed version. I think probably I'd like it better, and it doesn’t have a preface. -
Unlike many Americans, I was not introduced to Walt Whitman during my school years through English/Literature/Composition classes, but through a magnificent and beautiful film called Dead Poets Society. I fell in love with his poetry then, of course, not all of his poetry is shown, for the film speaks more of literature and its importance to human consciousnesses, rather than the different dead poets, but it did introduce me to "O Captain! My Captain!"(which is not in this collection, and I am so angry about it, because it should be in all of Whitman's works. I would however, not refer to him as Homer or Dante, I do not believe there might come a poet that will compare to the scope of those two, the closest I can get to someone compared to Whitman would be, maybe, Emily Dickinson.
A minority of the poems in this collection, but to me the most important at the time, deal a lot with preserving the union of the states, instead of what the South advocated, a separation. (One of the greatest economical disasters in the history of the US) With Song of Myself, which mostly speaks of private freedom, some have interpret it to mean his sexuality, but I have always thought of it as the entire "freedom" aspect, in a time where slavery was rampant. He was well known for opposing slavery, of course, he still had the skewed ideas of the time even though he considered himself egalitarian, and later on he saw abolition as a threat, which is one of the many points I disagree with him.
Now, the vast majority deals with sexuality. At the time of the original publication, many called this work obscene, for as many poets of the time, had done away with realism and the material world, and chose to write in a more allegorical manner that used symbolism and the religious/spiritual. I am more of an allegorical pal myself, but these poems are not at all offensive, people back then were prudes.
All this said, I do not agree with the "historical" consensus that this work is one of the greatest things to have come out of the United States. I believe many other poets, novelist, and short story writers, have contributed much more, not only to American literature, but to world literature. To say his work is the best of all, is kind of silly. But I am still going to re-read these poems in the future, I wish to see how much more my views can be influential to me. -
Amé esto. No sé mucho de poesía y esto me impresionó. Son el tipo de reflexiones con los cuales me identifico mucho, averiguando un poco sobre el autor me enteré de su background con las humanidades y me hace mucho sentido, veo mucha filosofía en sus poemas.
Creo que lo lindo de la poesía, es que si encuentran las palabras adecuadas, por un segundo logras ver el mundo con la misma mirada de alguien completamente diferente. Y es conectar en la experiencia de vivir.
Y eso, lo disfruté enormemente y sugiero leer en español si no manejan mucho el inglés. Hay varios poemas que marqué y los estaré pensando durante un tiempo. -
Song of Myself
I CELEBRATE myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease.... observing a spear of summer
grass.
An all-inclusive modern gospel—a secular one at that—with American cadence to it to unite the citizenry of the world. Witty and deeply moving poems and at times the whole effort of Whitman may seem anachronistic, one cannot help but realize that these poems are so relevant now.
It’s about the celebration of oneself, compassion toward others, and the gratification derived from that compassion and the human capacity to display tolerance, simply put it’s just the celebration of life itself. Walt Whitman teaches us to love oneself and see oneself in others and this love is not some onanism or anything of that sort rather a non-judgmental and unrequited love, and interestingly enough he tells us that he’s not a teacher or a philosopher yet in the next breath he will be teaching and philosophizing. Hence, his famous verse:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then .... I contradict myself;
I am large .... I contain multitudes.
Many critics and purists alike have argued Leaves of Grass is just outright nonsense or rambling of an invalid due to its non-conformity with the traditional rules of poetry, however, it seems to me that the critics fail to realize that what Walt Whitman wrote was the experiences he had with nature that got filtered through his senses and subsequently created art and that art is the free-verse poems in Leaves of Grass. The unrestrained subjective experiences of the objective reality of or perceived by a human being result in art like these poems, or any great piece of art for that matter. When we talk about capturing reality through our senses and presenting it with our abilities, great painters and artists come to mind, and one of the great examples is Vincent van Gogh and his Starry Night. Similarly, Walt Whitman was in such a state of mind where he just recorded what he was feeling in that euphoric state if you will, it may seem crazy and ludicrous to us, but he felt that he was one with nature and expressed his sentiments and gratitude wherein he simply exalts grass or breeze or sunrise or anything of that sort that we overlook in our everyday lives.
In addition, an interesting fact about these poems is that these poems were so offensive back in the day that Walt Whitman was fired from his job by his employer on moral grounds after finding an 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass.
At times a very difficult poet to understand, nevertheless, this is a must-read. And best experienced when read aloud.
-
This is what I thought the Bible would be like before I read the Bible: overflowing with characters and stories, all told at a sprint, with a shout and such good will that a sour sport as myself could hardly relate. Maximist, generous to a fault, a word-drunk prophet -- the god of this bible is Walt Whitman, and he could care a whit if you find that absurd or egotistical. I haven't felt the rush, pull and command of an energetic poetry like this outside of "Follow the Leader" by Eric B. and Rakim, who talk a lot about god, too. Reading LEAVES OF GRASS is as if my head was in a loud speaker turned to 11 as the guitarist jerked off his instrument on stage. My ears are sticky. The edition I read, the first published in 1855, had been added to until the poet's death, bloating the original thin volume. I'm glad I got my taste of the edited, restrained version. I think any more and I would have exploded.
-
Man. I don’t know anything about poetry, but this makes me want to read more of it. The introduction of my text was really helpful (especially for Song of Myself). Really beautiful songs and meditations on the divinity within humanity. The vision of that divinity is unbelievably democratic and wide-sweeping, especially when you consider it came out in 1855.
Here are a few cool passages/lines:
“A child said, what is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child …. I do not know what it is any more than he . . . Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped, Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?” (Song of Myself)
“I swear I think there is nothing but immortality! That the exquisite scheme is for it, and the nebulous float is for it, and the cohering is for it, And all preparation is for it .. and identity is for it .. and life and death are for it” (To Think of Time)
“I swear they are all beautiful, Every one that sleeps is beautiful …. every thing in the dim night is beautiful, The wildest and bloodiest is over and all is peace” (The Sleepers)
“I have perceived that to be with those I like is enough, To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough, To be surrounded by beautiful curious breathing laughing flesh is enough, To pass among them .. to touch any one .. to rest my arm ever sleep lightly round his his or her neck for a moment …. what is this then? (I Sing the Body Electric)
I also want to get the printed photo of the title page tattooed. Working on my barbaric yawp now. -
-
Il pregio di Whitman non risiede nell'arte della parola, della metrica o della struttura. Resta deluso e annoiato chi - leggendo in inglese - cerchi un canone o una ricercatezza lessicale nei suoi versi. Ha molto più valore sociale e sociologico, invece, la genuina meraviglia della sua poesia di scoperta del sé, disarmata e semplice al punto di diventare emblematica. All'inizio del '900 un'America pragmatica e manichea spesso criticò la sua naïveté, definendola inconsistente; alla fine del '900, invece, l'immaginario collettivo si identificò con la sua foto di vecchio saggio e visionario. Eccessi. Propria del tempo in cui scrisse è la forma impressionista, del frammento di senso. Qualche passo è felice, per originalità e freschezza, ma il lavoro in genere ha oggi un valore più storico che assoluto, o letterario, a mio giudizio.
PS: come suggerisce Cesare Pavese (vedi: "La letteratura americana e altri saggi" - Einaudi), può essere molto interessante leggere "Prose Works", in cui lo stesso Whitman parla della sua poesia, chiarendo alcuni degli aspetti compositivi di "Foglie d'erba".
************
The value of Whitman lies not in the art of word, in metric or structure. He leaves disappointed and sometimes bored the reader who looks for a rule or a lexical refinement in his verses. Much more social and sociological value, however, has the genuine wonder of his poetry of self-discovery, unarmed and simple enough to become emblematic. At the beginning of '900, a pragmatic and manichean America often criticized his naïveté, calling it inconsistent; at the end of '900, on the contrary, the collective imagination identified itself with Whitman's picture of an old wise and visionary man. Extremes. Impressionism and fragment of sense are typical cultural signs of Whitman's time. Some of his lines are happy (well conceived, I mean) for originality, intuition and freshness, but in my opinion the work in general has today a value which is more historical than absolute, or literary.
PS: as suggested by Cesare Pavese (see: "The American literature and other essays" - Einaudi), it can be very interesting to read "Prose Works", in which Whitman itself speaks of his poetry, clarifying certain aspects of the composition of "Leaves of 'grass' -
Leaves of Grass’ original publication spurs many differing feelings in me to such a degree that I really do not know where to begin or where to conclude. First should come the ambition of Walt Whitman as he writes in poorly-written prose for a long preface before his poetry: to be the great American poet; to answer Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay and finally bring Homer to the United States; to capture the wide-ranging truths of a massive, young country populated by the ruthless and the diverse. Whitman not only seeks to be this poet, but claims to be. I will say that his poetry accomplished an ideal of the white northern American man, the one who can think institutions of brutal racist violence to be “extremist” as Whitman would say, but that the counter-movement of abolitionism to be equally “extremist” and thus too divisive for the Union. Whitman’s vision of the United States is not the ruthless truth of the mid-nineteenth-century USA, but of his own idyllic understanding of the United States. This jarring relationship between the physical reality and the metaphysical projection of Whitman’s produces a work whose legacy has not yet produced much commentary that I can understand nor agree with, since much of what has been written about Leaves of Grass is not conducive to a thorough analysis of the aforementioned relationship.
The relationship between a person’s projection of the world and the reality of it is something that I actually adore; John Fahey’s extremely similar, American-primitivist album, America (an album with a shorter debut runtime in 1971 as opposed to its final 1998 release that weirdly has too much in common with Walt Whitman’s similarly evolving Leaves of Grass), is my third favorite album of all time in fact. What I have said before about Fahey and America, that the construction of a man and his surrounding landscape as it exists in his mind, is a beautiful and profoundly original concept; however, I am not convinced that either artist actually intended for their final products to have been interpreted for a charming naivete as I have appreciated from them. Of course, Fahey does not have the egotistical preface that Whitman does, nor does Fahey say a word throughout the 79-minutes that comprise America, so there is much more to be deduced in a subjective lens as opposed to Leaves of Grass. In this respect, Whitman celebrates the metaphor of the “leaves of grass,” that of the countless yet apparently identical blades symbolic of both life and death, and representative of humanity. At the end of the day, Whitman is arguing that we are all wonderful and all are divine creatures. Even the Indigenous and Enslaved Peoples of the United States, of which he refers to them by predictably outdated vocabulary, are of equal beauty to the white man. Even the women, they are beautiful. The laborer, the President, and every other occupation that Whitman meanders about for pages, are all equal. What is presented throughout the poetry is a juxtaposition in many ways.
Firstly, there’s the juxtaposition of universality vs diversity. We are all leaves of grass, identical and wonderful down to the bone marrow, but are all individually different peoples divided by our work, gender, state, nation, ethnicity, race, history and future, and morality. It presents an interesting inquiry for the reader to consider: is this juxtaposition purposeful, as to present a relationship between the physical and the metaphysical within Whitman’s poetry? If so, that’s incredible and utterly brilliant! But what if this relationship is simply an oversight on Whitman’s part, having concocted an ideal of universality as his vision of the American people as opposed to the diversity from which he uses as evidence throughout every poem? Nothing screams that either interpretation is necessarily correct or wrong to me, and so I am more inclined to align with the idea that there is a fundamentally subtle relationship between the physical and the metaphysical throughout the poetry.
The next juxtaposition is not all too different from the first, but it does not actually arise in the poetry itself. It is that of Whitman’s political moderation with respect to his poetry. Whitman was a man who was anti-abolitionist, but simultaneously anti-slavery. It’s no wonder that he claims to be a contradictory man, one worthy of the eternally-important line, “I contain multitudes”! But there is an issue when one’s vision of the United States – a vision that claims to put the United States to poetry – is not one that expresses an opinion on the enslavement of Africans during the mid-1850s, one that does not speak on the brutal treatments of Indigenous Americans. Is Whitman’s poetry only the poetry of moderate, white Americans? Those who have the privilege to look away from these issues because they are not impacting Whitman directly? While many Americans did not actually have an intimate knowledge of the brutal treatment against Enslaved Africans unless they themselves bore witness to these physical transgressions, Whitman has nonetheless undertaken the prospect of being the poet of America; the voice of everyone from the Oregon territory down to the marshes of Louisiana; the answerer of the winds and valleys and blooming flowers that stretch from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific. When taking on this role, it is fundamental that Whitman actually make this expression and as far as the reader can tell, the only slavery is that of tyrannical governments against the democracy-and-liberty-loving good man of the United States. I find that Whitman does not actually write exhaustively or comprehensively of the United States, but that he writes of himself instead.
So Walt Whitman did not truly turn the United States into a poem. Does that negate Leaves of Grass into utter shit? I do not think so. The beautiful thing of making music, writing poetry, or of any other artistic endeavor is that it is not withheld exclusively to the path that the artist has set out for themself. What I find is a highly valuable source of poetry that is innovative in aesthetics and profoundly optimistic, supposedly full of love for all who breathe and all who do not. It is in equal measure awe-inspiring and frustrating. Above all, it presents the reader with inquiries about art, nationalism, philosophy, politics, history, etc. I think that Leaves of Grass is a masterful collection of poetry because of this, because of what it informs us about the relationships between artist and art; artist and historical context; art and historical context; an individual and the world they simultaneously impact and are impacted by. Whitman is a problematic human being to consider in the twenty-first century, a man whose beliefs about the United States have aged like a bucket of milk, but his art is earnest. I accept that and think it is important not to separate Whitman from his poetry, since obviously neither exists without the other as we know them, but that the dividing line is vague and should not spur us to discredit the historical value of this kind of literature, even if Whitman was a pretentious and privileged asshole. I find this work to be problematic and believe that the discourse on it should not be so one-sided as “Whitman is the American Homer, our Milton” or whatever Harold Bloom said; our conversations on Whitman need to be more nuanced than one-sided praise out of fear of endangering the so-called canon.
P.S. “Song of Myself” cannot be excluded from any Leaves of Grass review; it is astonishing, beautiful, grand, winding, and the incredibly long poem is entirely worthy of being read in a single sitting. -
Maybe more of a 2.5? Idk.
I can definitely see why this is an important, ground-breaking collection in 19th century American poetry and I can also appreciate Whitman's craft to a certain extent, but honestly? I didn't love it. Whitman, while a clear-eyed observer, definitely goes in for quantity over quality (the endless lists get really tiring really quickly), and it is sometimes hard to follow the jumpy, otherworldly thoughts the poems present. A certain visionary zeal is amiable, but half of the time I felt like Whitman's visions went completely over my head, and the other half like he was repeating the same thoughts over and over in slightly different variations. Sadly, this doesn't only hold true for individual poems, but also for the collection as a whole, which feels rather repetitive. If I'm entirely honest, I was ready to be done with it by the point I had finished Song of Myself.
Also, apologies to all my American friends out there, but my tolerance for American exceptionalism - literary or otherwise - is at an all-time low right now. I'm not sure how much that coloured my enjoyment of this collection, but I will say that I did roll my eyes at Whitman's variations on 'this is the greatest nation on earth' a couple of times.
(Europe: the 72nd and 73d Years of These States was easily my favourite poem by far, but that's probably because it a) is easily the most political and b) the only one that really stood out for me in terms of style and content.) -
Probably one of my favorite things in the world,
Leaves of Grass. A truly magical masterpiece. -
So much hornier than I expected.
-
If you had browsed an American library or bookstand in the summer of 1855, there’s a small chance you might’ve come across an obscure and mysterious volume titled Leaves of Grass. You would not have found the author’s name on the cover or title page; your only impression of him would’ve come from an engraving on the opposite page depicting a handsome man in his mid-thirties, with a rumpled, unbuttoned shirt tucked into a loose pair of slacks, one hand buried in a pocket with the other balled and pressed ostentatiously to his hip, and a hat cocked fashionably to one side. Nor would you have found any information about a publisher: in one of literature’s great do-it-yourself projects, Whitman published the book himself using a print shop owned by two of his friends, printed and distributed copies at his own expense, and even wrote several reviews of his own work. None of the poems contained in the volume would’ve had a title, and the title of the whole work would’ve struck you as disarmingly self-effacing: “Leaves” could be used to describe the thin pages of a cheap book, while “Grass” was a nineteenth-century equivalent of what today’s publishers might call “Pulp”. You would’ve had little reason to suspect that this unassuming parcel of scribblings would someday be recognized as a literary masterpiece and the greatest and most influential distillation of the American identity.
Leaves of Grass is a work of solipsistic ecstasy, apparently the product of a genuine and profound mystical experience. It is a celebration of the “Self”; but before we dismiss Whitman as a pompous navel-gazer we must recognize that the self he describes is not confined to the egoic, individuated subject—the man Walt Whitman—but is instead a deeper and more universal phenomenon, shared in by all of humanity and alike in essence with the nature of divinity. As Whitman announces at the beginning of the first poem, later titled “Song of Myself”:
“I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”
It quickly becomes clear that Whitman’s self is all-encompassing: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” In the swirl of a burgeoning, democratic American civilization, Whitman’s individual identity becomes bound up with every other “leaf of grass” in the teeming, proliferating, endlessly diverse and dynamic mass of humanity that constitutes American society. This universal “I” becomes a frontiersman marrying a squaw in the forest of the pacific northwest; a quadroon girl on sale at an auction; a sailor manning his gun in a ferocious naval battle; a blacksmith; a lunatic being carried off to an asylum; a runaway slave being shot in the back by an overseer; a Kentuckian in buckskins; the fallen defenders of the Alamo; a whaler; a prostitute dragging her shawl—even a dinosaur, at one point.
Here, in his seamless appropriation of manifold personas, Whitman articulates the essence of Americanism: the promise of perpetual rejuvenation through the limitless recomposition of identity. The spiritual dimension of democracy is the transmigration of the egoic self to the capacious, cosmic self. It entails the simultaneous unity and self-sufficiency of all things; their fundamental equality and interchangeability, but also the validness, and even the grandness, of the ordinary subject. In Whitman’s spiritual democracy, everything is made of the same stuff, everyone belongs to everyone else, everything is fair, and everything is good.
In our moment of identitarian crisis, he makes for compelling reading. -
Book: "Oh, sun, oh moon, oh stars, oh earth, oh water, oh plants, oh animals, oh humans, oh houses, oh cars, oh strollers, oh tin cans, oh frypans-"
Reader: "Hey, book. What're you doing?"
Book: "I am listing all that is wonderful in the world! Oh frypans, oh water bottles, oh hawaii shirts, oh ukuleles-"
Reader: "Ukuleles? Really?"
Book: "Oh Ukuleles, oh banana boats, oh swimming pools, oh whiskey, oh cucumber, oh tomato, oh carrot, oh potato, oh soybean, oh bread, oh snow shoes, oh ug-boots-"
Reader: "Yeah, no, there's nothing justifiable about ug-boots."
Book: "Why do you have to interrupt me? And be so negative? I am being joyful here!"
Reader: "Listing random stuff ain't the definition of joyful."
Book: "It's just half of what I do! I also love all of the people! I love the Americans! I also love the Europeans! The African and Asian barbarians, the squaws and the-"
Reader: "Whoa, hey, they ain't barbarians and don't call 'em squaws. If only 'cause it's better for you."
Book: "But why should they mind? I love them! I love them all! They are all as good as the other! Men as women and women as men! The whites as the slaves and the slaves as the whites!"
Reader: "And yet you say "African and Asian barbarians", which is a tiny bit incredibly offensive."
Book: "But why would it be offensive when I love them all?"
Reader: "'cause you ain't questioning what you call them. Why would you call them barbarians or slaves at all? That's not what they are, it's what was forced on them by others."
Book: "But that doesn't change that I love them all! And they are all represented in me!"
Reader: "Oh great, a white saviour?"
Book: "Yes! And an American, the noblest and bestest and highest, bravest and kindest-"
Reader: "I call bullshit." *shoots*
Book: *dies*
Reader: "Oh, don't be such a dramaqueen. There's plenty other editions of you out there. TOO MANY, in fact."
Book: "You're mean! And I love you."
Reader: *shoots again* *shakes head* *walks away*
Curtain -
Another title I'm forever dipping into.
There are many editions of LEAVES; the 1892 'deathbed' edition (Whitman was knocking on Heaven's door when he was editing it) is one I've never been able to finish, mainly because it's just so. . .voluminous. Many poems for the ages there, but just as much dead wood, too, which always bogs me down.
This first, 1855 edition---this is my favorite. I call it the rock n' roll edition. Here, you'll find the poems---in their unadulterated, original versions---that set English-language poetry on its ear. "Song of Myself" in its earliest incarnation is my favorite.
Whitman was a brilliant poet, but a crappy self-editor. Truth be told? He blue-pencilled some of these poems to death in later versions of his book. Jack Kerouac once said about writing: "First thought, best thought." Too bad the Good Gray Poet from Mickle Street wasn't around to hear it.
It could've helped him immeasurably.
Whitman never surpassed the heights of the 1855 edition. In my humble opinion, it's the place to start if you're a Whitman rookie.
"To have great poets, there must be great audiences."
Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892) -
It is mind-blowing to think that he self-published this the same year Longfellow's the Song of Hiawatha came out. The voice is SO modern. If I keep rolling with his lists and moments of merge in his longer poems such as 'Song of Myself" or "I Sing the Body Electric, I am moved if not transported, but they are so hard to analyze. Shorter poems are easier to analyze. It was amazing to read this first draft - many critics say it was his best. I can't say but I love how he just keeps writing it through his life. I do love the historicity of this version. After all these years, I still love part 6 of Song of Myself best though I first read it in high school. His expression of women's sexual freedom is nothing but revolutionary. His universalism that celebrates nationalism is something that makes me a little uncomfortable now.
-
oh my god. this was transcendent, incredible, breathtaking etc etc. ive never read poetry like this before. you can literally FEEL whitmans excitement anf love for the world around him and its so beautiful and ur completely pulled into his world. so very gorgeous and amazing ‼️‼️‼️
-
Simply beautiful. Loved this edition as much as I loved the others I’ve read.
